Australian actor Grant Bowler portrays Richard Burton opposite Lohan’s Elizabeth Taylor in the film, which will debut in America on Sunday (25Nov12) – and he admits there were a lot of challenges for the cast and crew as his co-star struggled with off-set dramas.

Lohan was briefly hospitalised after a car crash on her way to work one morning and filming had to be halted when she was found unconscious in her hotel suite.

Bowler states, “We certainly took our time in a lot of ways, where I would have preferred to be shooting… I got a lot of stuff done, I answered a lot of emails. I got brought in a stack of, I think, 4,000 fan cards at one point and, in between two scenes, I was able to sign them all.”

But he isn’t complaining about the stop-start nature of the project, which he shot in Los Angeles earlier this year (12).

Bowler tells U.S. news show Access Hollywood Live, “A part of the job is you’re off when you’re off, you’re on when you’re on and you’re focused… Every single job is an opportunity to get better at my job. I’ve been doing this for 22 years and all I care about at the end of the day is how well I do at my job and how well I serve my audience.

“There were exercises in patience and there were exercises in tolerance and I believe it could have been smoother at times… and we could have got a lot more done on a couple of days, but you get what you’re given and when I was 18, 19, I dug ditches on the side of a hill for a living; it’s not as bad as that.”

The reviews for the film have been mixed, although many critics have raved about Bowler’s Burton.

The actor himself gives the film a B, stating, “The make-up, wardrobe and sets haven’t been given enough attention… Our hair, make-up and wardrobe people did a phenomenal job; they should all be up for awards… The look of the thing is phenomenal.

“There’s so many aspects of this movie where everybody put in to the absolute limit of their ability… and we did have crew members going down, they were exhausted, they were falling apart because they were putting so much into it… We had an Academy Award winning crew who were literally working themselves to the point of exhaustion.”